Perennials, page 9
At the words “life support,” Rachel let out a slight and, she hoped, inaudible gasp. “How do you know all of this?” She was trying to speak as little as possible for fear her voice might betray her.
“She called me today. She knows you’re at camp this summer.”
“She called you?”
“It’s really big of her,” Denise said, “that she would even keep us in the loop.”
“Gee,” Rachel said. “How generous.”
—
Denise was once a secretary at Rachel’s father’s law firm. Her mother was twenty-four when the relationship began; her father was forty-four. He was married—always had been, always would be, though Rachel was a young teenager when she finally understood this in a definitive way.
He had two children just a few years older than Rachel. Growing up, Rachel had been kept a secret from her father’s family. She had understood this unspoken truth as if it were part of the weather: because he wore a wedding ring, because the money always came in cash, because he took his phone calls outside, because their time together was always limited. They might have a nice weeknight dinner in the city, see a Broadway musical, take a day trip to the beach, but it was always just the two of them and never a week or a weekend, never an overnight. It worked for a while in its way, how he paid for the apartment and camp and gave Rachel whatever designer bag she asked for for her birthday. For an illegitimate father, he could have been worse.
It worked, until he thoughtlessly left her unmailed, unsealed sixteenth birthday card on his desk, in his family’s house in the suburbs, with the five hundred dollars cash inside.
The wife gave him an ultimatum: us or them. The kids, a boy and a girl, were away at college. Rachel imagined the wife—whom she’d never seen, whose name was never spoken—as a tiny, shrill lady, worn by her years of suspicions, becoming both scandalized and smug about having been proved right by the evidence at hand. Rachel imagined her standing in front of his home office, the money in her hand: “You can’t just keep bankrolling them when we have two Ivy tuitions to finish paying. What about our retirement? The home in Florida we’ve always wanted? How long could we have had that home by now?”
He gave Rachel and her mother one last wad of cash—a settlement of sorts—and went on his way.
Rachel’s secrecy had been so much a part of the deal that only when it was revealed as dirty, his presence revoked as a result of it, could she fully comprehend its power. How strange it was that she could threaten to ruin someone’s life—or several someones’ lives—by her mere existence.
The ultimatum happened just a week after Rachel had turned sixteen. Denise had only a high school diploma, but for Rachel, who went to a competitive New York City public school, college was around the corner. There was enough money for only one year’s tuition—maybe two, if she got a scholarship.
In a panic, Denise took a second job waitressing at an overpriced French restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The elderly Upper West Side couples were grumpy, but she made good money, especially on weekends.
One Sunday night about a month after her sixteenth birthday, Rachel was studying for her calculus midterm at the kitchen table when Denise came through the front door, slamming it behind her. Rachel looked up: Her mother’s white button-down was splattered with red sauce stains, and she was still wearing her apron around her waist. Denise dropped her purse loudly onto the kitchen counter and let out a frustrated groan.
When Rachel didn’t ask what was the matter, Denise took her jacket off and threw it on the floor. She untied her apron dramatically and threw that on the floor too.
“These fucking people,” she finally said, taking a wineglass from the cabinet above her head. “I wasn’t even supposed to work today. I cover for Sharon, of all people, and she doesn’t even tell me she was scheduled to work a double.” She took an unopened bottle of red wine from atop the fridge. Rachel waited with her pencil poised in her hand. She was averaging a B minus in calculus and needed an A on this test.
“And then”—Denise rummaged through a drawer to find a corkscrew—“one o’clock comes around, and get this: I get stuck with two four-tops, three two-tops, and a party of ten, including three fucking screaming kids flinging ketchup all over the goddamn place.” She poked the cork with the corkscrew and turned it hard. “They didn’t even make a reservation.”
She wriggled the cork until it came out of the bottle with a satisfying pop.
“I mean, what kind of French restaurant does brunch anyway? They don’t do brunch in France.” She poured the wine into the glass and lifted it to her mouth. “It’s a fucking rip-off, I’ll tell you that much,” she said, and took a sip.
Rachel looked down at her calculus textbook again. She could sense that Denise was standing with her hip against the counter, sipping her wine and looking at Rachel, and so she was not concentrating on the numbers in the book in front of her but instead feeling the profound annoyance of knowing her mother was watching her. Still, she did not look up.
“You eat yet?” Denise asked.
Rachel shook her head.
“You hungry? I brought back a burger. We could split it.”
“Go ahead,” Rachel said, standing. “I’ll eat later.” She closed her book and headed toward her room. “I’ve got to study.”
Rachel could feel that her mother had more to say. She waited on the threshold of her bedroom door for Denise to come after her, to yell, again, about how lucky Rachel was that she had a mother who didn’t make her get a part-time job, a mother who valued her daughter’s education, a mother who wanted her daughter to have all the opportunities that she hadn’t had herself. How lucky Rachel was that she had a mother who would work two jobs for her, despite that prick, that motherfucker, that dirty bastard who was trying to take away all their chances at something better.
There was a time, when Rachel was a child, when her parents still saw each other. A babysitter would come over and give her dinner and a bath and put her to bed. Her mother never dated anyone else in all that time, and Rachel suspected that maybe Denise had been waiting for him to leave his family and choose them, after all. But by the time Rachel was thirteen, he stopped coming over, and Rachel saw him only out of the house. Denise never told Rachel the particulars about the relationship ending, and Rachel never asked.
Rachel sat on her bed for a few minutes looking at her calculus textbook and began to feel guilty. Denise wasn’t coming after her this time. She got up to go into the kitchen to tell her mother she would eat the other half of the burger. But as she walked through the living room, she saw her mother leaning against the kitchen counter with her face in her hands, quietly sobbing. Denise hated when Rachel cried; she said it was a sign of weakness.
Rachel turned around and tiptoed back into her room, shutting the door behind herself carefully, hoping her mother wouldn’t realize that she’d ever left.
—
It had rained in the morning, but the night was clear and crisp, and Rachel knew there’d be a campfire on the beach. She walked down the trail to the lake with her flashlight. Her sandals squished into the damp ground, picking up mud and wet leaves on the bottoms of their soles as she walked. When she got closer to the water, she could hear someone picking the strings on a guitar and voices talking over the music.
When the trail ended, the ground turning from soil to grass to sand, Rachel clicked off her flashlight and stopped for a moment to look out at the scene: the fire crackling and blazing and the faces of the three counselors glowing with orange light. Everything else surrounding them was dark, and the lake had taken on a sheen of pure blackness that might make someone more superstitious than she wonder what lurked beneath.
Rachel walked toward the group, her usual crew: Fiona, Chad, and Yonatan. Yonatan played the guitar aimlessly and nodded in wordless recognition of Rachel. Fiona moved over on the wooden bench to make room for her friend.
“Where’ve you been?” Fiona asked, more curious than accusatory, though Rachel could often sense an unwarranted jealousy behind such questions.
“Just had to call my mom,” Rachel said. She pointed to Fiona’s beer. “Any more of those?”
Chad, on the other side of Rachel, reached into a cooler next to the bench, pulled out a Heineken, and used an opener on his key chain to open it.
“Bottles today,” Rachel said. “Fancy.”
“Yonatan and I walked into town yesterday,” Chad said. “We splurged.”
She took a long sip. She loved beer. Cheap or expensive, it didn’t matter. What she liked was that wheaty taste, like bread gone bad, the sourness that hit her as fast as a light switch turning on.
Chad grabbed Rachel’s knee. “How’s your mum?” he asked. They had become friends over the past three weeks. They had discovered that they were both children of single mothers and that Rachel would often check in with Denise before joining the rest of the group.
“She’s fine,” Rachel said.
“You’re lucky you can call her just like that. The time difference is too hard here.”
“I guess so.”
“You are,” Chad said. “I miss mine.”
Rachel lifted her bottle, and they clinked. A “cheers” from one child of an absent father to another.
Rachel had been fifteen when she had last been at Camp Marigold. She and Fiona had decided that this summer, the one between their freshman and sophomore years of college, would be the perfect time to go back together. It would probably be the last fun summer they could have, the last time they wouldn’t have to take on career-oriented internships or stay on campus during the summer to do research or take extra classes. At this point, neither of the girls knew what their careers would be, and they were holding on to that uncertainty for as long as they could.
Rachel couldn’t exactly afford such a low-paying job as being a summer camp counselor, but her mother’s waitressing gig had turned into a fairly lucrative second job, and she had encouraged Rachel to go back to Marigold one last time. Because she was still young. Because she’d worked so hard this year at Michigan between her work-study job and her full course load. Because it would make her happy. Denise was funny this way—she insisted she only wanted Rachel to be happy, but Rachel never knew when sacrifices her mother had made for her would be thrown back in her face.
Besides, Denise had reasoned, this was what loans were for. This was why they chose a public school, where the loans wouldn’t be quite so debilitating. Postgraduation, Rachel would have her pick of jobs and pay them back in no time.
When they arrived back at Camp Marigold in Fiona’s Jeep, elements of the place that Rachel hadn’t thought about in years suddenly reintroduced themselves: the welcome sign, posted on a wooden placard at the camp’s entrance, with marigolds painted a chipped orange and the ridiculous slogan (CAMP MARIGOLD: GROW WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED); the crunching of loose gravel underneath the car’s tires; the strong smell of the fresh manure from the horse stables coming through the car’s open windows. Rachel couldn’t deny the immediate comfort and ease that came with the return to a place where it seemed like nothing had changed.
Of course, it was different being there as a nineteen-year-old. They were now the counselors, whose lives they had been only peripherally aware of as campers. The international counselors had always been there, the Australians and the Brits and the Spaniards and the Israelis, but now, as a counselor herself, Rachel learned what they were really like. They were uniformly adventurous types: partyers and drinkers or, at the very least, adrenaline junkies. They came through agencies, which took most of their already low salaries but paid for their plane tickets and gave them their chance to come to summer camp, that fantastically American tradition. For many, like Chad, it was their first time in America. He had come straight from JFK to Lakeville, Connecticut.
“Is New York City like it is in Friends?” Chad now asked Rachel as they sat around the bonfire.
“No one normal in New York would live in an apartment that big,” said Fiona.
“What about Seinfeld?” Chad asked.
“I guess that’s more realistic, yeah,” Rachel said. “I don’t watch it that much.”
“I just love it,” he said. “The humor is so New York.”
“You mean Jewy?” Rachel asked.
Yonatan snickered.
The most Jewy thing about Rachel was her last name, Rivkin, and her bubbe, with whom she ate bagels in her house in Flatbush every other Saturday when she was growing up.
“You should come visit me in Tel Aviv, Rachel,” Yonatan said, still picking at his guitar. “You would love it.”
As Chad asked more questions about “real” life in New York, Yonatan began playing some songs Rachel recognized. He knew every word to “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley, and after a certain point, they stopped talking to listen to him sing in a charming Israeli-cum-Jamaican accent, totally engrossed in the lyrics (“How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”).
When he was finished, they clapped politely. Yonatan seemed embarrassed. He put his guitar down.
“It’s so hot,” Rachel said, wiping at her warm face. “Anyone want to go swimming?”
Before they could respond, she lifted her shirt over her head, unbuttoned her shorts, and left them in a pile in the sand. She ran toward the water in her bra and underwear. She knew what she was provoking when she undressed fast and publicly like this, but she didn’t, that night, have any end goal. Knowing that there were glances on her—that was enough. She kept going once her ankles hit the water—it felt warmer at night—and she swam out into the lake until she could float on her back and see only stars.
For a while, they left her there alone. The sounds of their conversation traveled clearly across the water. The boys were talking about soccer and the upcoming World Cup.
She thought of childhood summers on this lake. Night swimming when she would sneak out of her tent and meet boys there; they would kiss in the water and then roll around on the beach, the sand sticking to their wet bodies. She’d lost her virginity on this beach at fifteen years old to a seventeen-year-old junior counselor named Andy. After that summer ended, they never spoke again.
The clarity of the sky out here never ceased to amaze her.
She dipped under the surface of the water and then swam toward the dock. She pushed the upper half of her body against it and looked toward the group sitting around the fire, the orange embers of it crackling and slowly dying.
“Fiona!” she yelled. “Come in!”
Fiona waved from the circle. This summer, there was less room for spontaneity with her friend than there used to be. Rachel knew it had to do with Fiona’s very minor, slightly noticeable weight gain. Everyone gained a little weight at college, but Fiona brought it up so often, making continual self-deprecating comments about her body that Rachel was tired of having to quell. Fiona called herself fat all the time, which was far from true; Rachel had little patience for that sort of self-pity.
“You guys are no fun,” Rachel said, but she wasn’t sure if they heard her.
—
Rachel wrapped her arms around herself as she walked from the lake to the fire. The sand felt cold on her bare feet. She tried to hide her shivers as she stood for a moment air-drying her body at the dying fire in her bra and underwear, noticing the clandestine glances from all three of them. Then she put her clothes back on and walked up to girls’ camp with Fiona.
“What do you think of Yonatan?” Fiona asked.
“I think he’s sweet,” said Rachel. She also thought that he was handsome, but she could tell that he was the kind of smart, modest guy who didn’t believe a girl like her would be interested in him. He probably thought that for her to date or even hook up with him would be playing against type. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Fiona said. “Well, he asked if I would save a dance for him on Friday.”
“That’s cute, Fee!” Rachel feigned her best impression of enthusiasm. “What did you say?”
“I said yes,” Fiona said. “I think. I was sort of embarrassed.”
“You’re adorable.” Rachel put her arm around her friend. “You should hook up with him. That would be so exotic.”
“I don’t know if I can handle anyone seeing me naked right now.”
Sometimes she hated this about Fiona, couldn’t indulge her constant insecurities. Rachel wanted Fiona to understand how great she was: smart and insightful and loyal and kind. But explaining this over and over to her never seemed to work.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Rachel said without a hint of sympathy, and Fiona did not argue with this.
—
It was a Monday morning, and the girls in Rachel’s tent woke up excited. It was a new week of activities, many of which they had signed up for because they were coed. According to Rachel’s rule, Wednesday was the last possible day the boys could ask them to the dance. It was go time.
At flag raising, Rachel watched the boys and girls making eyes at each other. Helen was far flirtier than Fiona ever was, but still so young. Prepubescent. She was interested in boys for the attention, not for the actual physical component of a relationship. Sheera seemed to be uninterested altogether. Sarah, with her newly D-cup breasts, had attention lavished on her by the more confident boys without much of a choice on her part.
Jack, the camp director, stood next to the American flag. He was probably in his early forties and had a certain masculine confidence. He was one of those men who seemed so traditional about gender roles, so insistent on the boys standing on one side during flag raising and the girls on the other, insistent that all the female counselors wear one-piece bathing suits, as if the infiltration of a woman’s sexuality would cause mayhem and upset the order of everything. But he was handsome: tall, with tan, muscular legs and graying chest hair peeking out from the neck of his T-shirt. She’d never been with an older man; it was a bucket-list kind of thing. That spring she’d developed a crush on her married English professor, who taught pre-nineteenth-century American literature, an otherwise insufferably boring course. She hadn’t acted on it, though. Married was one boundary she wouldn’t cross. Jack, she knew, was divorced.
